Alleyway Stats

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Virtual Launch Party!!! OPEN MINDS!

Author Susan Kaye Quinn's concept for her new YA novel, OPEN MINDS, is fantastic. I read her initial query/blurb months ago over on YAlitchat and was totally blown away. I'm ecstatic to finally get my hands on it! Being a part of her Launch Party is icing on the cake!

I'm blessed to be Chapter 3 of her guest posting segment. She's doing a series, taking you on a journey of how Open Minds came to be. For the whole story, visit the other guest posts listed below.

I had a great setting (a mind-reading world), a
fantastic character (a girl who couldn’t read thoughts, but could mindjack into
other people’s heads) and a conflict (keeping her ability hidden while trying
to pass for a mindreader). Somewhere half-way through pantsing those 50+
thousand words, I had discovered my theme: intolerance. I was all set,
right?

Sure I could pad those 53k words a bit and come up
with a decent wordcount for my YA novel (80-90k). After all, it was just a
first draft, and a hastily crafted NaNo one at that.

About three weeks later, one day in the shower, I
realized I had only written about half the novel.

This was partly due to my tragic inability to write
a decent ending the first time around. Every novel I’ve pantsed my way through
has required multiple (like 7) drafts before I could get the ending right.
Apparently I was so wide of the mark on Open Minds that I’d completely
forgotten to write the second half of the novel.

Sigh.

I erased “THE END” and spent another month writing
an additional 30k words.

This was actually the turning point that changed me
from a pantser to the hyper-plotter that I am today. You would think that being
an engineer-type-person,
my Logic Brain would want to plot everything out and know exactly where my
story was headed before I opened the Word document. But for me, writing was
Creative Brain at the wheel, driving madly over the landscape, shouting,
"Check this out! How cool is this?? We are WRITING!!"

Which is fabulous fun, but also lands us all in the
ditch eventually, bruised and wondering who exactly put Creative Brain in
charge.

Properly chastened, my Creative Brain allowed as
how, perhaps, maybe, there might be something to this plotting thing, and
possibly we could spend some time checking it out.

I know many writers who very successfully write
novels via pantsing and many others who swear by their plotting techniques. In
the end, what matters is that the story is compelling. I had a fantastic start
to Open Minds, but I was nowhere near done. And I think it’s important
for any writer to realize that THE END is really just the beginning.

*********************

When
everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.

Sixteen-year-old Kira Moore is
a zero, someone who can’t read thoughts or be read by others. Zeros are
outcasts who can’t be trusted, leaving her no chance with Raf, a regular
mindreader and the best friend she secretly loves. When she accidentally
controls Raf’s mind and nearly kills him, Kira tries to hide her frightening
new ability from her family and an increasingly suspicious Raf. But lies tangle
around her, and she’s dragged deep into a hidden world of mindjackers, where
having to mind control everyone she loves is just the beginning of the deadly
choices before her.

Open Minds (Book
One of the Mindjack Trilogy) by Susan Kaye Quinn is available for $2.99 in
e-book (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords) and $9.99 in print (Amazon,
Createspace).

Hmmm...I'm a hyper-outliner, but I'd pretty much decided to trying pantsing my next novel to see how that works for me. But when Susan says she might go through 7 drafts of a novel, I'm not so sure I'm up for that!

oh, yeah, that happens to me all the time. Usually I have some great beta or critter or JRM who'll say, "You're not done here," and then I'll start thinking about it, and whamo! :D I'm more of a plotter now, too. Oh! And it seems I read somewhere that the best ideas come in the shower. Something about relaxing... <3